When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg showed up for a few photo ops during a recent recruitment sweep at MIT and Harvard, the top question was when Facebook would open up a local office. The sentiment seemed to be that Zuckerberg, an east coaster who attended Harvard, should have stuck closer to home to launch his hugely successful social networking site. He said that such a move might happen but wasn’t imminent. Less than a month later, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg announced plans for a new east coast engineering center: In New York City. Oh the ignominy.

The Boston area’s inferiority complex manifests itself in odd ways. Comments earlier this fall from Zuckerberg seemed to indicate that if he were to start Facebook all over, he’d stay out east. In the real world, he moved from Cambridge to Palo Alto, Calif. to start Facebook. But his retro comments fed a feeding frenzy of coverage.

Amazon has been loathe to open up offices in many states because doing so means it has to start charging state sales tax on purchases made by residents of those states. But new federal legislation could well end that advantage e-tailers hold over their brick-and-mortar competitors. That legislation could open the doors to more dot.coms moving actual offices or other facilities to heavily populated states.